A Design Pattern for Event-Based Processing of Security-enriched SOAP Messages

For Web Services in Cloud Computing contexts, the efficient processing of XML documents is a major topic of interest. Especially for WS-Security-enriched messages, processing performance nowadays tends to become a major issue. Streaming XML processing approaches lead to valuable optimization due to lower resource consumption, but their adoption requires major conceptional changes in the processing application. In this paper, we present a pattern for architectural concepts that employ the SAX-based streaming processing approach. Its major benefit-apart from providing the performance advantage-consists in a convenient, modular architecture that can easily be extended with new modules and new types of events without modification of existing modules.